Suchergebnisse

Anthropologists have always striven to understand the relationships between local and supra-local realities, the integration of smaller socio-political economic and cultural units into larger wholes, the creation of political and economic systems. In this paper, transnationalism is interpreted within the realm of debates on levels of integration, shrinking of the world and the creation of new realities that challenge existing forms of coping with life and inherited understandings within the social sciences. The discussion on transnationalism has frontiers and similarities with subjects such as globalization, world system and the international division of labor. But I argue that its own distinction lies in the fact that transnationality points to a central issue: the state/citizenship relationship, or to put it in a more abstract fashion, the relationship between territories and the different forms of socio-cultural and political arrangements that orient the way people represent their membership to a certain level of integration. The emergence of transnationalism is recent and it endangers the logics and effectiveness of the other pre-existing collective representations on socio-cultural and political membership. Although we may clearly speak of transnationalism, transnationality as such keeps in many regards potential and virtual characteristics. This is why I'd rather consider the condition(s) of transnationality and not its existence in itself. I will explore this subject by briefly presenting six clusters of conditions that are separable only for analytical and exposition purposes.

Unsettlement -- Moving images : reconceptualizing Indianness in Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge -- Affective objects : India shopping in the San Francisco Bay area -- Transnational Hindi television and the unsettlement of Indianness -- Global India and the production of moral subjects -- Aspirational India : impersonation, mobility, and emplacement

In this dissertation I examine the alterglobalization of computer expertise with a focus on the creation of political, economic, moral, and technical ties among computer technologists who are identified by peers and self-identify as "computer hackers." The goal is to investigate how forms of collaborative work are created on a local level alongside global practices and discourses on computer hacking, linking local sites with an emergent transnational domain of technical exchange and political action. In order to advance an understanding of the experience and practice of hacking beyond its main axes of activity in Western Europe and the United States, I describe and analyze projects and career trajectories of programmers, engineers, and hacker activists who are members of an international network of community spaces called "hackerspaces" in the Pacific region. Based on ethnographic research at community spaces, professional meetings, and informal gatherings I pursue the question of the conditions for cultivation of skills, moral sensibilities, and political orientations which allow for active participation in computer expert collectives. Drawing from ethnographic work, I suggest that "hacking" has become a global rubric for disparate cultural practices due to the confluence of Free and Open Source technologies and elite technologists with local community centers to support pedagogical practices for technical experimentation and political formation. In describing global and local level applications of computing expertise, I demonstrate how hackerspaces and computer technologists are, respectively, formed at cross-cultural contact points with the project of rearranging, challenging, and transforming established technical practices, infrastructures, and political imaginaries.

How can we take transnationality as a space of in-betweenness to generate new possibilities, moving beyond geographically bounded spans between countries? This article presents five authors' collective inquiry on transnational positionalities, which we practiced through the relational, transformative, and reflective writing of the self in a community space. We staged the collaborative writing into two processes: the emergent process of thematic writing and the relay writing. Interweaving "I" and "we" voices that cannot be captured through categorical thinking, our collaborative quest resists normative identity politics, proposing writing as a method of collective inquiry for the nuanced understanding of the transnationality that embraces flows, margins, and uncertainties. Collaborative writing, we argue, is a transformative opportunity for methodologizing transnationality and decolonizing qualitative inquiry.

This book is a collection of selected essays presented at the International Symposium on Contemporary Asian Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality and Hybridity hosted by the Humanities Programme of Hong Kong Baptist University in September 2006. As modernity has been used to describe the cultural, economic and socio-political conditions in the Western worlds, the time in which we now live and the Asian countries where capitalistic transformation is extensively carried out are already articulating their own descriptions. The essays collected here discuss the notions of contemporary, A